Terminus Rex

This is a destination where flavours turn into epiphanies.

In America’s A horse with no name, the song’s writer and vocalist, Dewey Bunnell mentions “there were plants and birds and rocks and things” as a fleeting reference to the space that is a desert. In the same vein, we’ll just fleetingly refer to the space that is the recently opened Terminus 1 restaurant in Vasant Kunj. There are chairs and tables and decor and things. And then there is the food.

The menu, taking inspiration from transit terminals all around the world, is a document dedicated to fusion food, a potage of Oriental, European, Indian and American ingredients, flavours, textures and dishes combined together like elements of a Surrealist mixed-media work. If that’s still too ordinary, there are also elements of molecular gastronomy in about 20 per cent of the menu to really mix things up.

Bamboozled by the sheer number of dishes vying for attention, we leave ourselves in the hands of the chefs, merely giving preferences for all things meaty and spicy. And then they arrive — Apple wood Smoked Chicken, Corn and Raja Mircha Chowder; Kimchi Bacon Quesadillas and Thai Chilli Chicken. Like characters in a romance novel, our lives will never be the same again.

First up is the chowder: the server sets the bowl on the table, while a chef comes with a lighter and a smoke gun. A couple of clicks and a hiss later, apple wood-flavoured smoke jettisons out of the gun and into our covered ceramic bowl. As smoky (and flashy) as an ’80s dance floor with a flavour hotter than any Billboard Top 100 song playing on it, the chowder is merely an intimation of the things to come.

You don’t need an internet meme to inform you that streaky bacon and sweet-and-sour kimchi stuffed in a warm, crisp quesadilla can do only good things to your mouth, so we shan’t waste our breath stating the obvious.

Then there’s the game changer. Like Christopher Nolan transforms movies into cinema by challenging your perceptions of life and even reality with varied plot devices, the Chilli Chicken here challenges your perceptions of the dish and perhaps food itself, with the incongruous addition of a strawberry sauce. The chicken itself is accented with Thai notes of galangal, lemongrass, tamarind and lime leaves with a spicy undertone. When combined with the sweetish, tarty strawberry sauce it is elevated from a dish to an epiphany.

Chilli Chicken will never be the same again.

As stuffed as Heathrow airport, we decide to keep it simple with our mains. Boy were we wrong. Our grilled fish may be standard sole, but it comes encrusted in crushed peanuts and sesame seeds, on a bed of sliced eggplant — deep fried the way your granny used to make it — with a Franco-Japanese hybrid sauce of cucumber dashi veloute and some wild black rice that will makes one reconsider their allegiance to basmati. The Steak au Poivre, grilled to a textbook medium rare, and splashed with a velveteen pan sauce and its namesake of cracked peppercorns, also glides down one’s gullet.

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Meal for two: Rs 1,500 (inclusive of taxes, exclusive of alcohol)
Address: S 238, 2nd Floor, Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj.
Contact: 40870755

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Tags:
Oriental food